Home Itself

Published Nov. 15, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Home is where the heart is,” a friend tells me.  We are talking about where home is for each of us, which naturally involves WHAT home is.  I counter his definition with Valley author Gerry Haslam’s favorite description:  “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

           

     Both of these descriptions implicate people, describing home as a social environment.  There can be no doubt about that aspect.  All I have to do is be around my mother, bless her heart, for five minutes and I’m mentally back in kindergarten.  This aspect of home is what many of us are facing as the holidays approach, with its mixture of blessings and re-livable curses.

           

     But for me, the word “home” always involves a physical environment, with specific climate, topography, vegetation, wildlife, even geology.  This is to say that home - for me - is also geographic, with a historical context that I have in some way participated.  It is a permanent place where people come and go.

           

     And when I go home in my mind, it is to a specific place where I never lived, but visited often.  When the homing instinct bears down on me, I fly back to the “ranch” in western Washington where my Aunt Hazel lived the best years of her life.

           

     It helps that she often said she bought the place for us, her youngest sister’s offspring, so we would know what it was like to farm.  It helped that what little farming she did made her exquisitely happy, but it was more the life she lived there on that place than any one activity.  She loved harvesting the apples from their little orchard and making pies and ‘sauce, as well as watching the deer come down from the forest above to harvest their share.  It was fishing in the creek and frying trout for dinner. It was baling hay and putting up oats for winter, watching cats in the barn catching mice.  And it was photographing all of it that made for peace in her life.

           

     That place is home for me, I realize now, because there is where I learned the basic truths of my life.  That food comes from the land, and shelter as well.  That contentment is achievable and worthy of pursuit.  That I am an outdoor person at root, and curious about the natural world, fascinated enough to learn from books and from my own observations.  That intimacy with a place, a little piece of land, is priceless.

           

     They say you can’t go home again.  I’ve never believed that, though for most of us over 40 the places we once lived are unrecognizable now.  We destroy home for ourselves every time we obliterate bird habitat, push out olive groves, level fields for development.  But if, as I feel now, that home is an intimate relationship between people and place, there certainly is room for us to come home.  May the pending holidays help us stretch in that direction.

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Trudy Wischemann is a native Washingtonian who writes from home in Lindsay.  You can send her visions of your home place c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Jessup's Tire

Published May 17, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “I’m really going to miss this place,” Sallie McDonald told me last week as we sat in what used to be Jessup’s Tire.

           

     I’d come to find out how I made the terrible mistake in my column two weeks ago, implying that the new owner of the building was being unreasonable about the date to vacate the premises. “Let’s just say he was understandably eager to begin work,” she corrected me.

           

     We looked around at the walls and floors, the windows letting in morning light, the beauty of the past preserved in the present use of the building by the Lindsay-Strathmore Coordinating Council in their modest, but critical offerings to the community.  I realized that I’m really going to miss this place, too.  It will be demolished by the new owner.

           

     The thrift store’s counter is in the same place where I first met John Jessup in the last years of the tire shop’s operation.  I went there with the excuse of wanting to know if I could still buy tires for the 1947 Dodge flatbed I’d acquired in August, 1994, hoping to use it as a parade vehicle for my rural advocacy work.  I looked around as he thumbed through the catalogs of tires, finally delivering a certain “yes” to my question.  The years of serving this community showed in the photos of Lindsay High football teams and class pictures displayed on the walls, the ads for cars and tire companies, the word “vulcanizing” prominent.  John Jessup held his place in this town with dignity and respect.  I felt privileged to be there to witness it.  On the shop’s last day of business, I photographed the interior, wall-to-wall.

           

     “Who knows the history of this building, how the City came to own it?” I asked Sallie.  She said “Joe.”

           

     Joe Mohnike sells insurance two doors down from Jessup’s Tire, so I passed by his open office door, saw him sitting at his desk, and went inside.  It turns out that Jessup’s Tire had once been his grandfather’s livery stable, one of two in town.  The stable had a place for dipping livestock in creosote to protect them from vermin, and Joe’s first sentences of concern were that the soil contamination there should prevent the demolition of the building.

           

     Another reason appeared.  “John Jessup gave that building to the school district for educational programs and some kind of museum,” he followed.  “They didn’t want it, so they sold it to the City for $2,” he said, correcting another mistake I’d made two weeks ago.

           

     But his concern about the building was trumped by his concern for LSCC’s efforts.   “It’s sickening,” he said, “the one thing this town really needs – the Coordinating Council - is being pushed aside.  No one’s getting rich from it, and it brings people downtown.  Nothing else does that but the hardware store – what does that tell you?”

           

     Both Joe and Sallie view the large number of empty run-down buildings in town as part of the problem we face in revitalizing our community.  These buildings are the town’s anchors, like the root of a tooth.  The historical knowledge and caring needed, which seem to be missing at City Hall, are here, waiting to be tapped.  May we find another path than the one we’re on.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rapt listener to Lindsay’s stories.  You can send her yours c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.  Thanks to my editorial board for keeping this story straight.

Hearing Voices

Published August 26, 2015 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     It’s been an unquiet week in Lake Woebehere, my adopted hometown.  With paycuts, petitions, and the usual propaganda, some of Lindsay’s many voices have been speaking outloud.  Sorting the messages has kept me busy, although I think the cacophony is a healthy sign.

     Underneath that din, there have been other voices wafting through my days.  One is my cat Dot’s, who wakes slightly earlier than I do with a bleat, not a meow.  She is old, growing more frail by the month, and deaf enough to be confused by sounds rather than guided by them.  An affectionate lick by one of the others or her own sneeze can knock her down.  When I look at her, I often see her entire life passing before my eyes.  Her time is coming to return to dust.

     When she arrived at my house as a kitten, she was just a speck.  Two girls found her and her brother in the park one evening, wandering around with their eyes glued shut by mucus.  The girls brought them here, and though I already had enough cats, I also had a tube of antibiotic eye ointment in the feline medicine cabinet.  The girls did not, so I was the kittens’ best chance.  That was June 1998.  I’ve never been sorry.  

     I’ve been sorry about the park, however.  Where the kittens were born, near the hospital bordered by the orange grove, where you could sit on the grass watching kids run around like banshees and feel like you were out in the country - that place is gone.  It’s buried under the concrete and blacktop of Ono City Parkway.  The missing orange grove is now just a paragraph in the resolution permitting the development of an up-scale housing subdivision there.  That paragraph required the developer to remove the trees section by section as building progressed.  Instead, he bulldozed the entire grove to install the underground utilities, which he never finished.  Now his plans have turned to dust along with the ground itself.

     So another voice I’m hearing is the sound of my own regret.  I hid my eyes as the City began destroying the park to build the aquatic center.  When I finally woke up, saw what was planned and realized we should try to save the part they hadn’t deranged, it was too late.  The photographs they used to get the grant from the state to renovate the park showed its terrible condition but didn’t mention that the City was the agent of that destruction.  When I called the state seeking help in delaying the renovation until public input could be included in the design, they didn’t believe me and forged ahead, turning our once pastoral place into an urbanized space.

    
     Arm-in-arm with regret are the voices of betrayal.  Sitting in the Memorial Building Thursday evening for a community meeting on the proposed rate increases for sewer and garbage, I was jolted by flashbacks of two meetings almost 4 years ago.  

     In one I heard the voice of Mike Camarena, director of city services, telling many of these same people in that same room how the park redesign would suit their needs.  When he discovered that the audience had other ideas and that they would rather see the funds used to fix their neighborhood streets, he “misspoke” about deadlines on the source of funding.  In the other flashback I heard the voice of Bill Zigler, our new interim city manager, reassuring these citizens who came to a city council meeting to request input on the park’s redesign that “There will be swings.”  Swings were at the top of their list.  There still are no swings.

     Friday, when I asked Bill and Mike why there still are no swings in the park, they responded that they have other priorities.  May they be hearing voices soon.

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Trudy Wischemann is a writer trained in environmental planning who is mortified by this city’s priorities.  You can send her your list c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay, CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Earth and Heaven

Published Dec. 24, 2014 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     For the past month, as the days have marched quietly toward the Solstice and the Manger, I’ve been reading two experts on the relationship between earth and heaven to keep me centered on the realities of this season.


     Eugene Peterson, a Presbyterian pastor and scholar who translated the Bible into contemporary language in The Message, has a book of daily reflections called Living the Message.  The December 15th entry was particularly meaningful for me, because he wrote about the importance to his family of the book by Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It.  He said they loved it because “it gave dignity and a sense of holiness to our place, a place that was home to us....We already knew it was a holy place, but the book confirmed and deepened our reverence.  The book functioned as a shrine, calling attention to this place:  this is holy ground -- worship God here.”


     Walter Brueggemann, also a Presbyterian and theologian who wrote The Land:  Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge in Biblical Faith in 1977 (reissued in 2002 in an expanded second edition,) has become the grandfather of a growing movement in land theology.  Briefly, he has reinterpreted the Old Testament message from a placeless chronicle of God’s acts in history to one of “storied place” in which the main theme becomes the covenant with God in the land (a state of landed-ness) and the movements to and from land-less-ness when God’s people weren’t holding up their end in covenant.  The refocus of the connection between God and Earth is radical, but heaven-sent.  It’s a window on a new faith relationship with land and place which is long overdue.


     In this season we’re keenly aware of the journey of Joseph and pregnant Mary from their rural home village, Nazareth, to Bethlehem.  And it’s not because they had better hospitals in Bethlehem, but so that they could be counted and taxed for the new cities the Roman Caesar was building in their country with the complicity of the Jewish priests and King Herod.  In effect, Joseph and Mary and the majority of the Jewish people were in exile in their own country, occupied by urban foreigners who extracted the wealth of the land through the fingers of the rural peasants.  The night the star shone bright and the angels came down singing hosannas to this newborn child and scaring the wits out of some innocent shepherds who went away singing - that night was not dark just because it was winter in Israel.  It was a dark time in the history of God’s people, and he was shining a light on that, too.


     And who were God’s people?  In the Christmas story we see that being Jewish did not ensure that status.  Herod was Jewish, but he’d broken his covenant long before the angel Gabriel gave Mary the good news.  The Wise Men were not Jewish, but they listened and followed God’s instructions, tripping Herod and saving the infant Jesus from the king’s murderous scheme.  My reading of Brueggemann suggests that God’s people were those who kept covenant in the land and the poor, those who had been dispossessed of land but still honored their Maker, having faith that sooner or later, God would redeem his people and restore them to land from which to make their living.


     In the Lord’s Prayer we say “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  I pray that message will become bright and clear this Christmas:  that this means here, now.  Watch for the light tonight.
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Trudy Wischemann is a Quaker writer who worships with the Methodists in Lindsay, where there will be a Candlelight service tonight at 6 p.m.  Send her your starlit sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.